Trajective chains in mesology / Augustin Berque

Trajective chains in mesology

von
Neumann chains in physics, etc. – and in chemistry ?

by Augustin BERQUE

Abstract –The leading idea of
mesology (the study of milieux) originates in Plato's Timaeus, with the
paradoxical relationship of chôra (milieu) and genesis (relative
being), which are posed as both an imprint and a matrix of each other.
Though foreboded, the idea of milieu was locked out by Plato's
rationalism, because it infriges the principle of the excluded middle : A (an
imprint) cannot be non-A (a matrix), and there is no third term, both A and
non-A. After Uexküll, who proved experimentally that an animal and its proprer
milieu (Umwelt, not to be confused with the general data of the
environment, Umgebung) are precisely in such a relationship, and after
Watsuji, who, as for the human, named this relationship fûdosei (mediance)
and defined it as the structural moment of human existence, mesology has
logically and ontologically formulated empirical reality r (that of concrete
milieux) in the following way : r = S/P, which reads "reality
r is the subject S as the predicate P". Reality is neither S (the Real in
itself) nor P (a subjective representation), but emerges in a process called
trajective chain by dint of which, indefinitely, S is assumed as P,
producing S/P, which in its turn is hypostasized into S' by P', and so on in
the following way : (((S/P)/P')/P'')/P'''... etc. Homologous
chains have been observed also in physics, and named "Neumann
chains". Then what about chemistry?

You will not find “mesology”in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary; nor will you find mésologie in most dictionaries of the
French language, although this word was listed in the first edition (1906) of
the Petit Larousse, with the
following definition: “Partie de la biologie qui traite des rapports des
milieux et des organismes”.[1]
Here, the word milieu is understood
in the present sense of “environment”, i.e. the external conditions affecting
the life of a plant or an animal. The word mésologie
was coined by a physician, Charles Robin, who proposed it as one of the
first tasks of biology at the inaugural session of the Société de biologie in
Paris on June 7th, 1848. Robin, a direct disciple of Auguste Comte, professed
positivism, that turn of mind which the Oxford
Shorter defines as “recognizing only positive facts and observable
phenomena and rejecting metaphysics and theism”. That same mesology was also
advocated by Robin’s colleague, Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, who gave it an
uncontestable lustre in the second half of the XIXth century, as
testifies its presence in the Petit
Larousse of 1906. Although Ökologie,
introduced by Haeckel in 1866 in the second volume of his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, had penetrated in French as écologie as soon as 1874, it was still
not listed in that first edition of the Petit
Larousse. Yet, écologie was to
supersede mésologie in the XXth century,
and the latter faded away from dictionaries after the Second World War.

One
may wonder why the word mésologie was
replaced by that of écologie, since
their initial definitions were almost exactly the same.[2]I surmise that this may be due to two
reasons. First, the scope of mésologie,
which encompassed also the social sciences in Bertillon’smind, was too vast for a single positivistic
science. Second, the influence of the English language, in which only “ecology”
existed. Indeed, although “milieu” can be found also in English, and, as in
French, can be understood as a synonym of “environment”, English adopted
directly “ecology” as the science of environment, without the stage of a
“science of milieux” (i.e. mesology).

§ 2. The establishment of mesology

Now, while mésologie was sinking into oblivion in France, it was born again in
Germany under the name of Umweltlehre
in the works of Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), and then in Japan, in Watsuji
Tetsurô’s[3]
(1889-1960) essay Fûdo (Milieu, 1935), under the name of fûdogaku 風土学. Uexküll was a biologist – famous as one of the founders of ethology,
and the forerunner of biosemiotics –, whereas Watsuji was a philosopher, but
both were influenced by phenomenology. This led them to pose a founding
difference between environment (Umgebung,
kankyô 環境) and milieu (Umwelt, fûdo 風土) : whereas environment is a
universal objective raw datum, milieu is the peculiar way in which a certain
living being, singular or plural (a species, an organism, a person, a society…),
interprets the environment and elaborates its proper relationship with it.

Accordingly,
milieu supposes the subjecthood of the concerned being, whereas environment
does’nt. This led Watsuji to conceive of mesology as a phenomenological
hermeneutics (kaishaku genshôgaku 解釈現象学).On the other hand, environment is a
typical modern object in the tradition of Descartes’ dualism and mechanicism,
while milieu is something else.

It is not impossible that Watsuji,
who was much younger than Uexküll, had heard of him during a stay he made in
Germany in 1927-1928, possibly through his reading of Heidegger, who was deeply
influenced in those years by Uexküll’s views as testifies his seminar of
1929-1930[4];
but this is only a conjecture. Be it as it may, the two authors published almost
simultaneously, each of them on his own side, respectively one of the two
founding classics of the new mesology: Streifzüge
durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (Raids into the milieux of animals
and humans, 1934) and Fûdo. Ningengakuteki kôsatsu (Milieux. A study of the human interlink, 1935)[5]. Their points of
view are homologous, except that Uexküll considers the living in general (in
fact mainly animals), and Watsuji the human in particular.

Of
course, Uexküll being a naturalist, and Watsuji a philosopher, they do not have
the same methods. That of Watsuji is
historical, whereas that of Uexküll is experimental, and as such exemplarily
scientific. This is what makes his theses a true revolution, since it is by
using the very methods of modern science that he rejects its mechanicism. For
him, animals are not machines reacting to stimuli, they are machinists (Maschiniste) interpreting signs; and
correlatively, they are not simply determined by the environment, they create
their own milieu in a mutual relationship with it.

Accordingly,
in the same environment (Umgebung),
the milieu (Umwelt)of a certain species differs from that of
another species; but in any case, the milieu is always the best suited for the
concerned species, as the species is for that milieu. It follows that, though pessimal
the environment may seem, the milieu is always optimal. Subsequent discoveries
of extremophile species have ceaselesssly corroborated this rule.

Speaking
of “objective reality” in such conditions is at best only an abstraction, and
in fact expresses a naive anthropocentrism. As Uexküll’s experiments have
proven, “that an animal may ever enter into relation with an object, this tacit
hypothesis [that of behaviourism] is false”.[6]That with which it enters
into relation, and which, for it, is concrete reality, are the things proper to its milieu, not the
universal objects of the environment,
as they may be considered by ecology with the look from nowhere of modern
science (which is no more than the scientist’s Umwelt).

Let
us give an example. An electromagnetic wave of λ = 700 nm is a universal physical datum. In our
species, Homo sapiens, this
wavelength is perceived (interpreted) as red. In the species Bos taurus (the cow), this same
wavelength is not perceived as a colour. It is outside the range of visible
colours. For a bull, red does not exist. A bull cannot enter into relation with
red, as Uexküll would have put it. In a corrida, what excites the bull is not
the colour of the muleta, it is the
gesticulations of the toreador. Likewise, the human eye does not perceive
infrared, which a snake’s eye perceives. It does not perceive ultraviolet,
which a butterfly’s eye perceives. In addition to this specification of things
proper to the human species, crops up a further specification, proper to each human
culture. Red, for example, is traditionally not the colour of a wedding dress in
Europe, whereas it is in Japan. A red light is perceived as “stop!” by an
average driver, but for the red guards of the Cultural Revolution, it meant on
the contrary “forward!”. Etc.

This
is to say that concrete things, as such and not abstracted into objects, are
never universal, nor neutral; starting from the physiological level, they are
always, in relation with a certain subjecthood, fraught with a specific meaning
and value. This is what Uexküll calls Ton
(tone), which I shall render with as[7]. He declines these
different kinds of reality of one and the same object into diverse categories :
Esston (as food), Schutzton (as a shelter), Wohnton (as a habitat), Hinderniston (as an obstacle), etc. The
same grass, for example, will exist as
food for a cow, as an obstacle for an ant, etc.

One
should note that these different Töner (or
different as), in Uexküll, are often
composed with a verb : essen (eat), schutzen (defend), wohnen (inhabit), hindern (prevent),
etc. There is here obviously an ongoing action. Uexküll even accentuates this
active aspect by speaking also of Tönung (tonation)
; for instance Esstönung, tonation as
food. That action, in short, is a certain process, which transforms some of the
abstract data of the environment into the concrete reality of a milieu.

In
mesology, this process is called trajection[8]. Inbetween the two
theoretical poles of the subjective and the objective, it “trajects” the Umgebung into an Umwelt, the abstract objects of the environment into the trajective
things or affordances (one should of course remind here Gibson’s concept) which
constitute a concrete milieu.

This
radically transgresses the ontological frame of the modern Western classic
paradigm (MWCP). The concrete things of a milieu are not substantial objects,
subsisting out there in the identity of their in-itselfness (Ansichheit); they are always in the
making in their interaction with a subject, and reciprocally, the subject is
always in the making, in interaction with these things; in other words, in a
dynamic coupling with a milieu.

Uexküll,
however, did not make such an ontological inference; this is because he was a
scientist rather than a philosopher.[9]
Watsuji on the other hand, who was a philosopher, posed in the first line of Fûdo the ontological concept of fûdosei風土性, which he defined in the same line
as “the structural moment of human existence (ningen sonzai no kôzô keiki 人間存在の構造契機)”. I
translated fûdosei[10]with médiance because of that definition. Mediance is indeed the dynamic
coupling, or Strukturmoment (kôzô keiki 構造契機), of two “halves” (medietates
in Latin, hence “mediance”), one which is – to borrow Plato’s vocabulary – a
certain being’s physical topos, and
one which is that being’s chôra, or
milieu.

§ 3. Mediance and trajective chains

Though Uexküll did not propose such
an ontological concept as mediance, he uses an image which amounts to the
same : Gegengefüge, that is the
counter-fitting, or mutual adequacy, of the animal and its milieu; and though the definition of mediance was
formulated for the first time in 1935 by a Japanese philosopher, the corresponding
idea has profound roots in the history of Western ontology, since its first
manifestation can be traced as far back as Plato’s Timaeus, with the non-concept of chôra. I write “non-concept” because, although Plato suggests a
trajective relationship between relative Being (genesis) and its milieu (chôra),
chôra being both the imprint (ekmageion, 50 c 1) and the matrix
(mother : mêtêr, 50 d 2, ornurse : tithênê, 52 d 4) of genesis[11], he renounces to
define chôra. He only circumambulates
around it by dint of such metaphors, which moreover are contradictory, and
eventually dismisses it as a dream (oneiropoloumen
blepontes, 52 b 3) or “bastard reasoning” (logismô tini nothô, 52 b 2).

Indeed,
being both an imprint (A) and a matrix (non-A), chôra, i.e. the idea of milieu, challenges the three principles of
identity (A is A), of contradiction (A is not non-A) and of the excluded middle
(which would be both A and non-A, or neither A nor non-A)., which have been the
pillars of Western rationalism until quantum mechanics has proved that a same
particle can be at the same time both a corpuscle (A) and a wave (non-A).

Twentieth-century
physics, thus, has revived the problem which Western rationalism had foreclosed
for more than two millenia. Now, this was not the case East of Aden, where
tetralemmas have been of common use from India to Japan, especially so in
Buddhism. I shall understand here tetralemma in Yamauchi Tokuryû’s order, that
is 1. A, 2. non-A, 3. neither A nor non-A, and 4. both A and non-A. As he
argued convincingly in Logos and lemma[12], putting
binegation (neither A nor non-A) in fourth position, as is usually done, leads literally
to nothing, whereas putting there biassertion (both A and non-A) opens up all
sorts of possible worlds. Now, this seems to be the case in mesology, since a
single and same object A in the environment (e.g. a tuft of grass) can exist as many kinds of realities (e.g.
as food for a cow, as a shelter for a beetle, etc.) according to the respective
mediances of these diverse beings.

Trajection
is precisely the process through which a same object becomes (gignomai : genesis)
different kinds of realities. This process is analogous to a predication in
logic, as expressed by the formula S is P,
in which S is the logical subject (what the matter is about) and P the
predicate (what is said about S).

One
needs here to bear two points in mind : that 1. the logician’s “subject” is the physicist’s “object” ; and that 2. in the history of Western thought
since Aristotle, the relation of subject
to predicate in logic is homologous to the relation of substance to accident in
metaphysics. This entails that in the relation S/P (S as P), S is
substantial and objective, whereas P is unsubstantial and subjective; and this
is indeed why, in the MWCP, S amounts to Descartes’ res extensa (the object) and P to what the res cogitans (the subject) has in mind about S.

According
to this dualism, reality is S (the object), and P a mere subjective representation
of S. Now, this does not hold for mesology. S is an abstraction, whereas concrete reality is the way S exists as
something for a certain being I (the interpreter of S as P). The binary
relation S-P is an abstraction; concretely, we have a ternary relation S-I-P,
meaning that S exists as P for I. For
instance, one and the same tuft of grass S exists as food (P) for the cow, but
as a shelter (P’) for the beetle, as an obstacle (P’’) for the ant, and so on.
Concrete reality is not S, but the relation S-I-P, which implicates at the same
time substance, interpretation and non-substance in the process of trajection,
which is a process of concrescence,
i.e. becoming concrete or “growing together” (cum crescere) in the dynamic coupling of a certain being with its
milieu.

Now,
saying that the trajection of reality is a process amounts to saying that
reality is historical. It is not an objective R (the Real, or S in itself), but
a trajective r (reality in the making, or S as P for I). In this historical process,
new beings I, I’, I’’, I’’’ etc. indefinitely re-interpret S as P, P’, P’’,
P’’’ and so on. Keeping I implicit for graphic simplicity’s sake, this can be
formulated as : r (reality in the
making) =(((S/P)/P’)/P’’)/P’’’… and so on, indefinitely. This is called in
mesology a trajective chain.

§ 4. Trajective chains, semiologic chains,
von Neumann chains

The above formulation shows that P,
in the succession of S/P, (S/P)’, (S/P)’’ etc., is indefinitely placed in the
position of S’, S’’, S’’’ etc. relatively to P’, P’’, P’’’ etc. In other words,
it does not only become the subject of a new predicate, it is substantialized,
or hypostatized.

This,
at first glance, seems irrational: how can nothingness (non-substance) become
something substantial?

Now,
this process is analogous to what Roland Barthes, in his Mythologies[13], called “semiologic
chains” (chaînes sémiologiques), a
process in which historical realities become myths, and in which signs,
understood as the relation between the signifier and the signified (signifiant/signifié, or Sã/Sé), become the
signifiers of further signifieds. This can be represented exactly in the same
way as trajective chains, viz (((Sã/Sé)/
Sé’)/Sé’’)/Sé’’’… and so on.

This
is not only an effect of formal figuration. First, a new signified is nothing
else than a new predicate. Accordingly, the transformation of history into myth
is homologous to the assumption of S into P, or of substance into non-substance.
Second,the course of history shows
plenty of examples in which unsubstantial myths, i.e. mere words, like in the
hypostasis of P into S’,are transformed
into quite substantial things, e.g. pyramids in ancient Egyptian religion. An
even more striking example is how the Arcadian myth, after three thousand years
of progressive substantialization, eventually provoked the present warming of
planet Earth, via the multiplication of detached houses associated with the
massive use of individual cars[14].

In
any case, these chains concretely suppose the agency of an interpreter I in the
ternary relation S-I-P, or Sã-I-Sé. The binary Saussurian
(and Barthesian) relation Sã/Sé is an abstraction. In
this respect, the mesological conception of trajective or semiologic chains is
akin to the Peircean triadic conception of semiosis, though what Peirce called
“the interpretant” does not exactly coincide with what I call here the
interpreter, that is a living being, and especially a human being.

Yet,
the interpreter I is never limited to the topos
of an individual person or organism; it is always and necessarily medial,
i.e. composing such a topos with its
corresponding chôra, or milieu. In
the case of the human, this milieu is eco-techno-symbolical. In addition to
ecosystems, it comprises all sorts of institutions, both technical (e.g.
buildings) and symbolic (e.g. languages or religions), indefinitely
intertwining into concrete and concrescent reality S/P, and always conditioning
an individual person’s thought and supposedly “free” will. In this sense, the
milieu (chôra) amounts to what Marx
called Produktionverhältnisse,
Foucault dispositif, etc.[15]

The
Christian tendency to insist on the individual’s free will (since the absolute
dwells in each person’s conscience, as Saint Paul and Saint Augustine said: manes in memoria mea, Domine) made that
the West was late in realizing this conditioning, but East of Aden, especially
so in Buddhism, it had been known for centuries as prajñapti in sanskrit, sesetsu
施説
in Japanese, etc.[16]

From
the point of view of mesology, the agency of this conditioning is nothing else
than the trajection of reality S/P. It is what is at work in the “/” between S
and P, i.e. the as in “S as P”, at
any ontological level, from matter to mind via life, and from the res extensa to the res cogitans.

Such
a view is not modern, since it is not
dualist. Neither is it premodern, or “prelogical”, as
Lévy-Bruhl would have put it. It is transmodern:
beyond modern dualism and beyond the principle of the excluded middle (called
in French tiers exclu, i.e. “excluded
third [term]”), yet basing precisely on what modern science’s dualism has
experimentally proven both in biology (as we have seen with Uexküll) and in
physics, as we shall see below.

It
is now almost commonly assumed that, in quantum mechanics, measurement affects the
system which is measured, as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, nearly one
century ago, have argued in the so-called Copenhagen interpretation.
“Interpretation” here is not only what the modern cogito deems reality to be, i.e. theoretically S, but empirically
S/P (S as P). Moreover, it is what the physical device of the experiment itself
produces, i.e. causing the set of probabilities to collapse into only one
reality (in other words, causing Schrödinger’s cat to be either dead or alive,
not both). Human interpretation will then follow this first “interpretation”,
which makes one and the same particle exist as either a corpuscle or a wave
(not both); an “interpretation” which is purely physical, independent from the
observer’s personal interpretation, and supposedly objective since it is
experimentally proven.

From
a mesological point of view, the experimental device here is nothing else than
a dispositif or a sesetsu[17], performing as
such a trajection which makes the wave function “collapse into”, or exist as(ek-sist
out of the experiment as) either a wave or a corpuscle, i.e. either S/P or
S/P’, in the ternary structural moment S-I-P or S-I’-P’ (I or I’ being here the
device). This entails that, ontologically, the result of the experiment is not
abstractly “objective” (S), but concretely trajective (S/P or S/P’). And for
the same reason, successive measurements with successive devices will produce a
chain of results which are homologous to a trajective chain
(((S/P)/P’)/P’’)/P’’’… and so on. Such chains, in physics, have been called
“von Neumann chains”. [18]

§ 5.Chemistry in the concrete milieux of the Ecumene

I am not a chemist, nor an alchemist
or even a philosopher of science, but a geographer wondering about the reality
of the ecumene, that is the relationship of Humankind with the Earth, or the
whole of human milieux. This has led me to advocating mesology in the sense of
Uexküll’s Umweltlehre and Watsuji’s fûdoron. In such a view, chemical
reactions are what happens between the ontological level of the Planet and that
of the Biosphere, i.e. between matter and life, in the form of trajective
chains.

It
would first come to mind that these chains, at the ontological level of
chemical reactions, may correspond to the trophic chains of the Biosphere. In
such a logic, the chemical constituents of a tuft of grass (S), which are
assumed as food (P) by a cow, will then be digested so as to become, in the
following hypostasis of this trajection, the cow itself (S’).

In
the present state of my reflexion, this equation of metabolism to a trajective
chain is hardly more than a metaphor, and it should need much more relevant
investigation than I can do as a geographer. Yet, knowing that chemical systems
are the very language of nature[19],
this hypothesis should make sense. For example, the chemical mimicry of a
myrmecophile insect (living among ants in their nest), can be understood both
logically and ontologically if we consider it as a trajection in which this
insect, because it imitates an ant’s smell, is confused with a true ant and
thus is not killed by them; it means indeed that, though abstractly it is not
an ant, concretely, that is for these ants, this insect exists as an ant.

The
trajection here is a chemical process in which the smell in question corresponds
to different cuticular hydrocarbons, i.e. alkanes and alkenes on the insect’s
cuticle. The non-ant insects in this respect seem to follow two strategies :
“either they emit a smell similar to that of the ants (chemical mimicry), or
they emit little smell, but rapidly cover themselves with the smell of the ants
or that of the interior of the nest (chemical camouflage)”.[20]
And by doing so, these truly non-ants (S) exist as concrete – if not authentic –
ants (S/P). Which, by the way, beyond the principle of the excluded middle,
corresponds to the fourth lemma of the tetralemma : both non-A and A, assuming
that A stands for Ant and non-A for non-Ant.

Metabolism
for its part has been compared with an “assembly line, in order to describe the
enzymatic systems which are responsible for the production of metabolites (…)
These machineries (…) are complexes of highly specialized enzymes with
complementary functions. Each of the enzymes of that complex is responsible for
the chemical transformation of a substratum, the result of which is transmitted
to the next enzyme in order to realize the next transformation”.[21]

From
a mesological point of view, this “assembly line” is nothing else than a
trajective chain, in which what in fact is a “transformation” (S/P) is hypostatized
into the “substratum”, i.e. the hupokeimenon
: subjectum: suppositum S’ of the next trajection (S/P)/P’, and so on, like
in the chain (((S/P)/P’)/P’’)/P’’’… etc.

As
can be seen, resulting from a transformation (the trajection of S as P), the reality
S/P, though placed in subject position S’ vis-à-vis the next predicate P’, is
not a “true” S, but an ersatz of S. It is S’, a hypostasis of S/P, not the
original S. Now, this is precisely the process of life, and that of the
evolution of life on the Earth, which made possible the trajection of the
initial Planet into the Biosphere, then of the latter into the Ecumene.[22]

In
physics, this transformation of an original
suppositum corresponds to what d’Espagnat calls “le réel voilé”, which is
not a theoretically pure S, i.e. “le Réel” in itself (an sich, as Kant would have put it, and as I like to represent it
with a capital R); it is no more than empirical reality, which I represent with
a small r in the formula r = S/P.

By
the way, it should be noted that, unfortunately, “le réel voilé” has been
rendered in English with “veiled reality”, which – that’s the case to say –
veils this distinction between the Real (S) and reality (S/P). Some kind of
trajection seems to have occurred during this translation over the
not-so-English Channel…

Palaiseau, 27 June
2017.

Augustin BERQUE
(1942 -), a French geographer and orientalist, is a retired director of studies
at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, where he
teached mesology. A member of the Academia europaea, he was in 2009 the first
Westerner to receive the Fukuoka Grand Prize for Asian cultures. Among his
books, Thinking through landscape,
London : Routledge, 2013. E-mail : berque@ehess.fr. <http://mesologiques.fr>

[2] Haeckel’s definition of Ökologie, in 1866, was the
following : “Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen den Organismen zur umgebenden
Aussenwelt (Science of the relations of organisms with the surrounding external
world)”.

[3] In the normal East Asian order, family name
(Watsuji) first.

[4] Recorded posthumously in his Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (The Founding Concepts of Metaphysics),
Frankfurt am Main : Klostermann, 1983.

[5] Both have been translated into
English, but the translator of Fûdo
completely missed Watsuji’s point. One should rather read the French
translation (Fûdo, le milieu humain,Paris : CNRS, 2011).

[12] YAMAUCHI
Tokuryû, Rogosu to renma,
Tokyo : Iwanami, 1974. I
discuss it from the point of view of mesology in my Poétique de la Terre. Histoire
naturelle et histoire humaine, essai de mésologie (Poetics of the Earth. Natural history and human history, an essay in mesology), Paris : Belin, 2014. My
translation of Rogosu to renma into
French is forthcoming at CNRS éditions, Paris.

[13] Paris : Seuil, 1957.

[14] I have detailed this case in Histoire de l’habitat ideal (History of the
ideal abode), Paris : Le Félin, 2010.